Project Pluto(merkle.com)
merkle.com
Project Pluto
http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html
4 comments
50's-60's in the US Military Industrial Complex seem like one hell of a period. Just think of the SR-71, first Keyhole satellites, Apollo - so much innovation over a couple of decades. It just seemed like an era with no imposed limits, a technological free for all where anything is justified in the name of beating the commies.
Just remember that such work during the Cold War came at a price. Talented engineers were sucked up into the machinery of the Cold War and put to use designing and building ICBMs, cruise missiles, nuclear weapons, fighter planes, and so forth. But on the other hand, that had a huge opportunity cost because it meant those people weren't working on other things. And while we still ended up with a lot of amazing civilian inventions in that time, some even due to spinoffs from Cold War technology, we should have no illusions that we probably missed out on others.
Rocket technology for one. It was almost impossible for "startups" to work on orbital launchers during the Cold War, for obvious geopolitical reasons. Much of our launch vehicle technology was based off of ICBM work, but there are some problems with that, since launch vehicles need to be considerably more reliable even than a missile designed to carry nuclear weapons. More so, the design of strategic weapons on the scale of importance of ICBMs tends to leave issues of cost by the wayside, whereas the same is not true for commercial launchers. Since the end of the Cold War there's been a flourishing of space-based startups, many of them seeing a considerable amount of success lately (SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, XCOR, Blue Origin, etc.) Potentially if the same sort of business and geopolitical environment had existed in the 1960s it's quite possible that we would have seen much faster advances in spaceflight than we have seen historically.
An that's just one aspect, who knows what else would have happened if many of the best engineering minds of a generation had not been lured (through monetary reward, through prestige, through a sense of national duty) into designing missiles and bombs.
Rocket technology for one. It was almost impossible for "startups" to work on orbital launchers during the Cold War, for obvious geopolitical reasons. Much of our launch vehicle technology was based off of ICBM work, but there are some problems with that, since launch vehicles need to be considerably more reliable even than a missile designed to carry nuclear weapons. More so, the design of strategic weapons on the scale of importance of ICBMs tends to leave issues of cost by the wayside, whereas the same is not true for commercial launchers. Since the end of the Cold War there's been a flourishing of space-based startups, many of them seeing a considerable amount of success lately (SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, XCOR, Blue Origin, etc.) Potentially if the same sort of business and geopolitical environment had existed in the 1960s it's quite possible that we would have seen much faster advances in spaceflight than we have seen historically.
An that's just one aspect, who knows what else would have happened if many of the best engineering minds of a generation had not been lured (through monetary reward, through prestige, through a sense of national duty) into designing missiles and bombs.
Who was it that wrote that had the millions of lives and trillions of dollars wasted in the World Wars been applied instead to peaceful pursuit of science, we would easily have had a man on the moon by 1950?
Wishful thinking, of course, but man, what a thought.
Wishful thinking, of course, but man, what a thought.
Imagine if the Greeks and Romans had continued their libraries, science and research 2000 years ago. If they hadn't fallen to Christianity and other religions, I'd bet we'd have been a spacefaring species around year 500 or 1000 maybe.
There was no way we were getting to the moon without the cold war. The current crop of "space-based startups" borrows a great deal from decades of NASA and military work.
I think this is an example of the "post hoc" fallacy. Because of the fact that we went to the moon in a certain way successfully, and no other programs have done so in the intervening time we end up with this idea that the Apollo project was the only way to do it.
And, to be fair, Apollo may have been the only way to do it so quickly. But let's look at some fundamentals. Why is spaceflight so expensive? The rocket equation is brutally exponential, for sure, especially up in the delta-V ranges needed to get to orbit. And yet the cost of fuel and materials does not explain the cost of spaceflight, those are tiny fractions of the cost of a single launch, in the 1% or less range. Instead, the cost is much more tied up with operational complexity, manufacturing scale and complexity, and so forth. When you produce custom vehicles in low quantities and each of them are one use, things can get expensive quickly.
But a big part of the reason why launch has been expensive has been due to the fact that it has been a government project for decades. Governments are not known for their cost efficiencies, and that has certainly shown through in spaceflight. The typical top-down, decade long or longer, multi-billion dollar project approach to spaceflight has certainly seen a lot of ups and downs over the last few decades, but it has done almost nothing to make spaceflight cheaper or more easily available. And yet look at what happens when commercial enterprise is let loose on the problem, SpaceX being the best example of course, but hardly the only example.
So many people think that the way to dramatically lower the cost of spaceflight is through some revolutionary means. New materials. New types of rocket engines. New designs. And so forth. None of this is true. What is needed is merely iteration. Practice. Persistence and pragmatism. Nothing more.
And shockingly, such things have not been tried very much in launch vehicle design or manufacture in the many decades since humans have been building orbital rockets. SpaceX's rockets are hardly revolutionary, they are merely pragmatic. But their iteration cycle time is now down to only a few years, and they are already working on building their 4th and 5th generation rockets in their short history, and in so doing dropping the cost floor out of the rocket business lower and lower with every step.
Now imagine for a moment if instead of doing Apollo, and Skylab, and the Shuttle, and ISS (projects totaling up a good chunk of a trillion dollars in expenditures) only a fraction of that amount of money had been spent working diligently (with pragmatism and persistence) on improving rocket designs year by year, decade by decade. Imagine if many of the greatest engineering minds of the Cold War generation had been working not in the service of their country to achieve a goal no matter the expense but to produce clever and innovative designs to lower the cost of access to space.
I have no doubt in my mind that they would have succeeded at least to the same degree as the SpaceX Falcon 9 has. Such a rocket is a simple design, it's just a two stage LOX/Kerosene launcher made mostly out of aluminum parts. Certainly the engineers of an earlier era would not have had the benefit of friction stir welding, CFD simulations, and so forth, but they would have been able to achieve quite a lot. And with economies of scale in manufacturing vehicles in an assembly line they would have produced fairly decent cost levels as well.
And then what happens when you take NASA's budget from any year after the Apollo program's heyday and you apply that to the ability not merely to launch a paltry half dozen or so Shuttles a year but to put up a station like the ISS and launch over a hundred astronauts, and more. Every. Year. And I'm not exaggerating, these are fairly conservative estimates and I've taken into account the overhead of developing hardware and astronaut operations and so forth. That's just how much farther money can go when there are systems in place which have been designed from the ground up with cost in mind.
Then ask yourself. If so much could be done in a single year with nothing more than a run-of-the-mill historical NASA budget, then what happens over decades? If by 1970, 1980, or even 1990 it had become possible to achieve such launch costs, what would we see today? I'll tell you. We wouldn't just have gone to the Moon, we would have stayed. There would be cities in orbit, and outposts on Mars by now.
And, to be fair, Apollo may have been the only way to do it so quickly. But let's look at some fundamentals. Why is spaceflight so expensive? The rocket equation is brutally exponential, for sure, especially up in the delta-V ranges needed to get to orbit. And yet the cost of fuel and materials does not explain the cost of spaceflight, those are tiny fractions of the cost of a single launch, in the 1% or less range. Instead, the cost is much more tied up with operational complexity, manufacturing scale and complexity, and so forth. When you produce custom vehicles in low quantities and each of them are one use, things can get expensive quickly.
But a big part of the reason why launch has been expensive has been due to the fact that it has been a government project for decades. Governments are not known for their cost efficiencies, and that has certainly shown through in spaceflight. The typical top-down, decade long or longer, multi-billion dollar project approach to spaceflight has certainly seen a lot of ups and downs over the last few decades, but it has done almost nothing to make spaceflight cheaper or more easily available. And yet look at what happens when commercial enterprise is let loose on the problem, SpaceX being the best example of course, but hardly the only example.
So many people think that the way to dramatically lower the cost of spaceflight is through some revolutionary means. New materials. New types of rocket engines. New designs. And so forth. None of this is true. What is needed is merely iteration. Practice. Persistence and pragmatism. Nothing more.
And shockingly, such things have not been tried very much in launch vehicle design or manufacture in the many decades since humans have been building orbital rockets. SpaceX's rockets are hardly revolutionary, they are merely pragmatic. But their iteration cycle time is now down to only a few years, and they are already working on building their 4th and 5th generation rockets in their short history, and in so doing dropping the cost floor out of the rocket business lower and lower with every step.
Now imagine for a moment if instead of doing Apollo, and Skylab, and the Shuttle, and ISS (projects totaling up a good chunk of a trillion dollars in expenditures) only a fraction of that amount of money had been spent working diligently (with pragmatism and persistence) on improving rocket designs year by year, decade by decade. Imagine if many of the greatest engineering minds of the Cold War generation had been working not in the service of their country to achieve a goal no matter the expense but to produce clever and innovative designs to lower the cost of access to space.
I have no doubt in my mind that they would have succeeded at least to the same degree as the SpaceX Falcon 9 has. Such a rocket is a simple design, it's just a two stage LOX/Kerosene launcher made mostly out of aluminum parts. Certainly the engineers of an earlier era would not have had the benefit of friction stir welding, CFD simulations, and so forth, but they would have been able to achieve quite a lot. And with economies of scale in manufacturing vehicles in an assembly line they would have produced fairly decent cost levels as well.
And then what happens when you take NASA's budget from any year after the Apollo program's heyday and you apply that to the ability not merely to launch a paltry half dozen or so Shuttles a year but to put up a station like the ISS and launch over a hundred astronauts, and more. Every. Year. And I'm not exaggerating, these are fairly conservative estimates and I've taken into account the overhead of developing hardware and astronaut operations and so forth. That's just how much farther money can go when there are systems in place which have been designed from the ground up with cost in mind.
Then ask yourself. If so much could be done in a single year with nothing more than a run-of-the-mill historical NASA budget, then what happens over decades? If by 1970, 1980, or even 1990 it had become possible to achieve such launch costs, what would we see today? I'll tell you. We wouldn't just have gone to the Moon, we would have stayed. There would be cities in orbit, and outposts on Mars by now.
You are quite right. People don't seem to be able to think straight about space. It is surrounded by a shroud of mystique and mystery but it actually is very much an industrial endeavor.
I highly recommend Kerbal Space Program for this, by the way-- I feel like I've got some good first-hand experience of how normal and boring space really is.
"One of the interesting things about space is how dull it is. Staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so. You see, there is so much of space, and so little in it. Would you like me to quote some statistics? They too are quite sensationally dull." - Slartibartfast
"One of the interesting things about space is how dull it is. Staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so. You see, there is so much of space, and so little in it. Would you like me to quote some statistics? They too are quite sensationally dull." - Slartibartfast
Everyone here has read A Colder War, right?
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
If Charles Stross would've had at least half of Lovecraft's literary talent, it might have been an enjoyable reading. Anyway, it's a nice piece of sci-fi work (though a bad piece of literature and not even very imaginative...).
Holy shit. 500 megawatts? in a single missile? That seems to more than what Nimitz class carriers produce(190MW).
Or am I reading this wrong?
That is crazy. But a quick couple of searches show that aircraft engine are actually pretty amazingly powerful.
I did some googling, and numbers aren't usually supplied in MW, so there may be some errors up ahead. (I'm hoping an expert in the field sees this and corrects my work. :)
That being said, I think that the 747's power output is around 140MW; it appears that the SR-71 is around the same at around 120MW; and the Boeing 777 is pushing 220MW.
I did some googling, and numbers aren't usually supplied in MW, so there may be some errors up ahead. (I'm hoping an expert in the field sees this and corrects my work. :)
That being said, I think that the 747's power output is around 140MW; it appears that the SR-71 is around the same at around 120MW; and the Boeing 777 is pushing 220MW.
Rocket engines can produce gigawatts as jet power. Kerosene and liquid oxygen is a very dense energy source. A jet engine is slightly bigger as it needs to pump air which is not very dense, but it's still much less complex than a power plant that has to generate electricity.
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